Recent Submission To Seventeen Magazine's TRAUMARAMA Department

A True Story by Benjamin Swetland

One day something started to grow on my ass.

Perhaps not on my ass proper and more so on that flat steppe between the small of my back and the gulley going you-know-where, but in these kinds of cases the proximity of the inevitable has an over-riding influence. So I'll just say one day something started to grow on my ass.

It was red, painful, and ambitious. I mean, it was killing me. The location of my enemy prevented me from either standing or sitting without stabbing pain. I had always heard that the Viet Cong held POWs in small bamboo cages designed to prevent their captives from standing or sitting, forcing them to squat uncomfortably for days. As I hunched in my apartment, the ongoing mental association between John McCain and my ass only redoubled my agony.

So I went to the doctor. First I got to have a nice chat with the twenty-something attendant in my gown and black socks. Then, stretched out on the examination table the physician quickly diagnosed the problem: a peri-anal abscess. Hmm. A squirmy little set of words for sure, but so much the worse when your pants are across the room and a vaguely Eastern European woman is using them to describe YOU. The prescribed cure was a thorough lancing and a course of antibiotics.

Then I got to field the anal sex questions.

Now, look. I'm not gay and I've certainly never had anal sex, but as a part of a certain segment of straight guys who wear expensive jeans I have been asked if I'm gay before. What I've learned is that the last thing you want to do is be too strenuous in your denials. Yelling about how straight you are only makes you look like a gay-baby-seal-clubbing, beer-chugging, Eminem-listening, secretly-gay-being homophobe. That or a please-penetrate-the-paper-thin-armor-of-my-straightness-and-set-free-my-unmitigated-fabulousness gay dude. So when the doctor told me that whether you believe in God or in Mother Nature certain things don't fit in certain places, I could only nod my feeble assent.

After a quick numbing shot, the doctor punctures the swelling. Not really feeling the needle, what hits me first is the smell. Some bacteria can smell, I'm told. Fortunately, she rounds out the lesson by shoving gob after gob of stinking blood and puss rags in front of my face while intermittently wiping up the stuff trickling down my ass-crack. It was like having your diaper changed if your diaper is tiny and inside of you.

Next step is to probe the abscess to determine how deep it goes and whether or not it connects to any deeper tissue. This is achieved by shoving a giant Q-tip into my body and poking it around. Does that hurt? Yes, Doctor, it hurts. Would you like a pain shot? Yes, Doctor, I would. The doctor pokes her head out of the door and calls for two milligrams of something or other, blah blah blah. Two seconds later there's a knock at the door and a staffer comes in with the needle.

And who is it?
Who comes in?
Who has the shot?

Why, none other than the small Indian girl from work whom I publicly declared my crush on in my short-lived blog on the WORLD WIDE web. With my bared ass, streaming stinking blood and puss. With my brain exploding and soul taking flight. With my communist-childhood-having doctor wiping my butt. She actually managed to appear glad to see me before sprinting from the room, leaving me to receive my proverbial peri-anal probing.

On the way out my adolescent crush and I engaged in strained small-talk, took care of the bill, and in general DENIED ALL REALITY. Anyway, turns out it was a chance infection, the antibiotics worked, the thing healed, and I feel much better.

Right?